facts/figures about Swaziland's HIV/AIDS crisis

A few Sundays ago, we were riding back from church in our brother’s car, and we passed the Nhlangano SOS campus—an organization that houses and cares for orphans and vulnerable children. He pointed it out to us. Orphans and vulnerable children— or OVC’s—are among the Peace Corps’ primary concerns here in Swaziland. Currently one-third of all Swazi children are considered OVCs, and by 2010 there may be as many as 200,000 of them (the entire population of Swaziland is around 950,000). I thought of these numbers as we drove by the SOS dormitories and wondered what bhuti (brother) thought or knew of the magnitude of Swaziland’s OVC problem. So I asked a leading question: “are there a lot of orphans in your community?”
“Oh, my friend,” he said, shaking his head, “every single homestead is an orphanage.”
If he exaggerates, it’s not by much. Nearly every home really is caring for orphans, be they the sons of deceased neighbors or the daughters of deceased relatives. Every home, whether well-off or impoverished, has taken in someone else’s children and now feeds them, clothes them, protects them. Our family is no different.
There are a lot of roadside advertisements for coffins and funeral services. A fellow PCT
(Peace Corps Trainee) pointed out that coffin ads are nearly as common here as are beer ads in the US. It’s true. There are a lot of funerals in Swaziland these days. The big killers here are tuberculosis and pneumonia, both of which are opportunistic illnesses that can easily overwhelm the weakened immune systems of HIV-infected peoples. Here are a few HIV-prevalence statistics for Swaziland:

19% of the entire Swazi population is infected by HIV (currently the highest “overall population” infection rate in the world).
43% of all 30-35 year old Swazis are infected with HIV.
24% of all 15-45 year old Swazis (the “productive population”) are infected with HIV.
39% of women tested at antenatal clinics are HIV positive (this is the “ANC rate,” and it tends to skew high because they’re pregnant women—that is, they’ve had unprotected sex).
Swaziland’s HIV-TB co-infection rate is 80%, and it currently has the world’s highest TB rate: 1,100 cases per 100,000 people.

Amazingly, the casual traveler passing through Swaziland would not, I don’t think, detect the disaster that such alarming stats reveal. The cities are bustling, the buses are full and running, the major roads are paved, cell phone ring-tones fill the air, the markets abound with fruits and veggies and even meat, children walk to and from school in prim and proper uniforms… and all appears to be normal. A casual glance at Swaziland would not reveal a pandemic in action. We have only been here for a few weeks upon writing this, and if we left tomorrow I’d be unable to tell you what this health catastrophe “looked” like; I’d have to show you a snapshot of a coffin advertisement, or point out a fresh row of graves on the edge of my village, or a hillside terraced with SOS dormitories, or introduce you to the new young face in the kitchen at dinnertime.
So perhaps this disaster is like an undertow: those who stay on the surface might paddle right over it and never feel the deadly current sweeping beneath them. But it’s there.